A wrenching delineation of the culture of poverty—and how it shapes and circumscribes character.
This extensive revision of Oates’s second novel, published in 1967 and nominated for a National Book Award, breathes new life into a precociously brilliant book that probably deserves a place among the classics of American naturalist fiction.
The triptych focuses on the life of its “white trash” protagonist Clara Walpole, born the daughter of Kentucky migrant laborers. In the opening section, “Carleton,” Clara’s overworked, embittered young father experiences his growing family’s immersion in squalor, the loss of his eternally pregnant wife Pearl, and an emotional intimacy with his “favorite” child that sends him in search of the runaway Clara, with catastrophic consequences. “Lowry” is the phlegmatic vagrant who takes Clara to upstate New York (and Oates’s subsequently familiar fictional Eden Valley), fathers her son Steven (a.k.a. Swan), and abandons her to a relationship with married agricultural entrepreneur Curt Revere, who becomes her lover and her keeper. Swan tells Clara and his own story as the kept woman rises to respectability, the violence that seethed through Carleton reasserts itself in even his timid, bookish grandson, and Clara sinks into premature stasis and senility. As her thoughtful afterword explains, Oates has, in addition to reshaping particular incidents and emphases, enhanced this already potent story by replacing its original omniscient narrative voice with accents more closely aligned with her characters’ thoughts and speech. The resulting characterizations are unusually full and rich, and the sense of an implacable brute nemesis working its way through the Walpole generations is unerringly precise. Oates excels when depicting Clara’s sensual, earthy appetitive energies, and her portrayal of the hapless Swan’s self-destructive momentum, his feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one, is almost beyond praise. The gritty, insistent prose that has recently hardened too often into mannerism, here vibrates with revelatory clarity.
A wrenching delineation of the culture of poverty—and how it shapes and circumscribes character.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-8129-6834-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.
A wine expert in training visits her family’s vineyard in Burgundy only to discover a cellar full of secrets.
Kate Elliott, a San Francisco sommelier and daughter of a French expatriate, is preparing for a notoriously difficult wine-tasting exam. If she passes (most don’t), she will be one of a tiny cadre of certified Masters of Wine worldwide. She has repeatedly flunked the test; her weakness is French whites, so some serious cramming at Domaine Charpin, her ancestral vineyard, is in order. There, Kate rejoins Heather, her best friend from college, who married her cousin Nico, the Domaine’s current vintner. Kate herself almost wed a vigneron, Nico’s neighbor Jean-Luc, but feared being trapped in domesticity. Decluttering the family caves, Kate and Heather discover the World War II–era effects of one Hélène Charpin—her great half-aunt, Kate learns. Why, then, do the Charpins, particularly dour Uncle Philippe, seem determined to excise Hélène from family memory? Interspersed with Kate’s first-person narration are excerpts from Hélène’s wartime diary, which her descendants have yet to find. A budding chemist whose university plans were dashed by the German invasion of France, Hélène and her best friend, Rose, who is Jewish, are recruited by the Resistance. Hélène’s father, Edouard, is also a Résistant, unbeknownst to her stepmother, who embraces the new status quo. In the present, the little Kate is able to glean from the historical archives reveals that Hélène was punished as a collaborator, one of the women whose heads were shaved, post-Occupation, as a badge of shame. An extensive subplot, concerning a hidden wine cache and another sommelier’s duplicity, adds little, whereas the central question—what is up with the Charpins?—is sadly underdeveloped. The apparent estrangement not only between the Charpins and Philippe’s sister Céline, Kate’s mother, but between mother and daughter remains unexplored. Wine buffs will enjoy the detailed descriptions of viticulture and the sommelier’s art. Mah deserves credit at least for raising a still-taboo subject—the barbaric and unjust treatment of accused female collaborators after the Allied liberation of France.
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-282331-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.
Alcoholism brutally controls the destiny of a beautiful woman and her children in working-class Scotland.
The way Irvine Welsh’s Trainspottingcarved a permanent place in our heads and hearts for the junkies of late-1980s Edinburgh, the language, imagery, and story of fashion designer Stuart’s debut novel apotheosizes the life of the Bain family of Glasgow. Stunning, raven-haired Agnes Bain is often compared to Elizabeth Taylor. When we meet her in 1981, she’s living with her parents and three “weans” in a crowded high-rise flat in a down-and-out neighborhood called Sighthill. Her second husband, Hugh "Shug" Bain, father of her youngest, Shuggie, is a handsome taxi driver with a philandering problem that is racing alongside Agnes’ drinking problem to destroy their never-very-solid union. In indelible, patiently crafted vignettes covering the next 11 years of their lives, we watch what happens to Shuggie and his family. Stuart evokes the experience of each character with unbelievable compassion—Agnes; her mother, Lizzie; Shug; their daughter, Catherine, who flees the country the moment she can; artistically gifted older son Leek; and the baby of the family, Shuggie, bullied and outcast from toddlerhood for his effeminate walk and manner. Shuggie’s adoration of his mother is the light of his life, his compass, his faith, embodied in his ability to forgive her every time she resurrects herself from a binge: “She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.” How can love be so powerful and so helpless at the same time? Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down—then read the first sentence of the acknowledgements and lose it. The emotional truth embodied here will crack you open.
You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4804-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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